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// Chapter 5: The Road 
// Story: Blood Moon 
// by The_Darker_Fonts 
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The shoots of green that had peeked through the snow only days before were now several inches tall, the melting snow supplying plenty of water for them.  Clip nipped at them half-heartedly, their new stems stiff and tasteless to him, but still filling.  As spring had rolled in, he had found himself more preoccupied with finding a source of tasty food than anything else.  The weather had warmed up considerably, leading him to spend less of the daylight hours in the cave and more exploring his surroundings, even charting distances mentally.  However, with the greater amount of mobility, he also had a greater appetite, which wasn’t easily satisfied by the stiff grass and stale ivy.
The one thing that had been concerning to him in his explorations was the nearby road.  Before the winter had rolled in and isolated him, he’d kept mostly to the forest, out of curiosity and necessity.  While he'd gone to explore portions of the hillside around the lake and the back entrance to his cavern, he had never traveled in the direction of the looming Canterlot Mountains.  Less than a week after the snow had melted enough to release him, he had found it, and ever since, he’d been nervously monitoring it.
It wasn’t merely any dirt path lined with wood posts and the occasional trimmed hedge, however, and that was the reason for his concern.  The road was paved with smooth, round cobble, the fences, while nothing fancy, were well maintained and preserved.  There was mortar between the cobble too, not the usual dirt or gravel mix that would be used in the town square.  Clip had only seen a road like this once in his life before, when his father had allowed him to walk along the dirt path at home until he reached the Royal Road.  And staring intently at the well trodden, practically shining, road, Clip knew that it led straight to Canterlot.
Grumbling to himself at his remembered misfortune, he shoved aside a little brush to the side.  Currently, he was treading through one of the closest unexplored portions of the forest, searching for the coveted berries, snacking along the way to maintain his energy.  If regular grass and ivy couldn’t satisfy him, the sweet delicacy would, or at least, they would.  Suddenly, though, he remembered sourly that any of the berries he’d been looking for hadn’t been growing yet.  He was about to turn back, when he realized he could still commit to memory where exactly they were.  So not a complete waste of time, just an investment of it.
Soon enough, he’d scouted out the area he’d assigned himself to, and thankfully, he recognised a bush that did grow berries.  He couldn’t remember exactly what kind they did grow, though, but he figured he could just check later.  For the day, he began to head back to his cave.  He’d internalized a compass in his bowels that always pointed home, and no matter how far away he wandered, he knew how to get back.  Not that he wandered too far, no more than three or four miles a day, but having lived on the crossings between a swamp and a forest, he knew exactly how confusing traveling even half a mile could be.  
Shrugging of some of the rising cold, he checked the sky through the dangling branches and drooping leaves.  It was dark, near night almost, but not quite.  He had a ways to travel in a short time.  Despite the warming weather, the temperature still dropped dramatically whenever night fell in the forest.  He shivered as if to be proved by his physical self that it was the case, and he hurried his steps a bit more.  
Coming upon a clearing where he’d started his voyaging for the day, he checked the night sky again.  He found that, even though the traveling sometimes took hours, he passed it by in seconds.  It was a thrilling experience to make time fly at his own will, but sometimes he wished that it would slow enough for him to remember his surroundings.  No matter, he could see the waxing crescent moon.  In a few days, it’d be half full, but for now, it remained a slice of silver in the sky.
His hooves crunched the unmelted snow underneath the trees, trotting carefully between the thorny shrubbery of the unmarked forest.  He reached the turn to the back entrance of his cavern, plodding through the back entrance without falter.  His recent explorations had allowed him to properly become accustomed to the strange geometry of both sides’ entrances.  As such, he no longer found his sides as scratched up as they used to be, his fur less frayed and more hardened.  
That night he slept easy, and woke early.  He didn’t really mind much the fact that sometimes he slept on the mossy patches around the cave, and other times on the rough rocks.  Some days, when he’d had a rougher trek than usual, he’d find himself waking up halfway submerged in water.  It was a problem, to be sure, but he was sure that it was contemporary, and as he grew more familiar with his new home, the less he would find himself in the warm pools.  
That day, he traveled back out to the hills, scouting out bushes being revealed from their hiding places from under the white sheet of winter.  There were a few bushes and shrubs in the open, two recognizably raspberry bushes.  As he searched crevices, miniature ravines, and creek beds hidden between the hills, he found that there were a couple dozen of such bushes.  Though he was excited by the abundance of bushes and berries, it was dulled by the fact that he’d wasted time in the forest and had to move around in the open to get to them.  
The closest bush was about a quarter mile and a hill away from his hill facing entrance, but only a few hundred spans away from the road.  Any passerby who happened to look straight into the ravine would see it, and see a little colt trying to collect berries from it.  If they saw that, they’d get suspicious.  If they got suspicious, they’d tell others, and somepony might come to try and find him.  And that was unacceptable.
Clip didn’t know why he was so frightened by the prospect of being found out, but he wasn’t sure if he could explain why he’d disappeared when somepony had died in his company.  Even with him being a colt, it wasn’t unheard of.
Trudging back and forth over the hills, he attempted to memorize the position of each bush to check in a moon or too.  He’d lost track of time during the winter, and now went by moons as the only reliable measurement of time.  Of course, he couldn’t remember the actual days of the full moon, but he was able to remember the effects of the day after the moon.  He’d wake up incredible well filled, and cheerful like it was Hearth's Warming all over again.  That signified the full moon to him, and that was enough to go by. 
As he walked back to his home while night fell, he got a strange idea in his head.  Turning back slightly, he began creeping back towards the road, watching it intently.  He doubted that there were going to be any night travelers, but surely there’d be some guard or something crossing the stretch to ensure that there was nothing strange going down on the road, or nearby.  Crawling into the underbrush nearby, Clip sat in wait, watching intently for anything approaching.  
Before long, he was bored.  Staring up into the sky, he watched the moon, almost mesmerized by it.  However, something strange caught his eye.  Wasn’t the moon only a crescent last night?  Why was it now half full...